Rae Yang’s novel ‘Spider Eaters’ depicts a person who has lived in different portions of the world and has seen a great deal in the many decades she has lived.
Yang’s father, a diplomat in Switzerland, and Rae spend her childhood in Geneva. Yang joins a middle school and a high school in Beijing for the influential. During her adolescent, the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong a communist leader broke out. Rae actively participated as a Red guard like all her other peers in Beijing.
Yang later devoted four years of her life in a pig’s farm in northern China, doing manual work and grazing pigs. Though, Yang grew up loving and having faith for the Mao, the chairman of Communist party, her eagerness for revolution and loyalty to the birth of a new China stopped after she endured the adversity of physical work (Yang 150). When Rae realized that her family was not influential anymore, instead Yang was living in poverty. Spider Eater is written by Rae Yang, someone who has witnessed and participated in the Cultural Revolution in China.The purpose and methods of the Cultural Revolution as described by Rae in her Memoir Spider Eater, shows that Mao used lack of experience youth at that time, to drive his modernization ideas against the religion that was practiced at that time. The youth during Maoist presented themselves as inexperienced true believers of Maoist.
